Just keep smiling 💋

Re-Discovering Disney

The last half a decade has seen the huge revival of Disney, (need I mention Frozen) and has thrown those amazing classics back into the limelight.

The first Disney Princess to grace our screens was Snow WhiteWAY back in 1937, which might have been followed by more films sooner if not for WWII from 1939-1945, a period distinctly lacking in princesses off to balls as nearly all women were donning boiler suits and supporting the war.

The initial boom was in the 1950s with Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953) and Sleeping Beauty creating the four cornerstones of the Disney classics.

The second wave of Disney Princess films came unsurprisingly after the end of another war- the Cold War, with The Little Mermaid shown the same year as the final uprisings in Eastern Europe against the communist regimes in 1989. Beauty and the Beast marked the year of the formal dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (if you don’t know what USSR is- Google it. It’s very significant to current European events). Aladdin followed in 1992 and from 1995 there was one each year: Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan and Tarzan wrapping up the century in 1999.

It wasn’t until a decade after in 2009 that we saw the next Disney Princess film, The Princess and the Frog with the first non-white leading lady (about time- #princesses for equality! Mulan, Jasmine and Pocahontas still all had white skin…you get the point I’m trying to make). Welcomed back like the return of a prodigal son (or daughter), Disney powered through on their new found wave of support producing Tangled (2010), Brave (2012) and the big one- FROZEN in 2013.

So the last half a decade has seen the revival of Disney Princesses in a big way, it’s not just for kids any more, or rather those people who were kids in the 90s are still loving being a princess well into their twenties. Buzz feed, Etsy and generally the whole retail world has catered to every adult princess’s needs (dresses, quizzes, hairstyles, jewellery etc etc etc) 👗💄💍👛👑

Amid this new acceptance of “adult princesses” there have been a number of beautiful re-imaging of the classics. I was totally enchanted by the recent drawings by Jurka Vinse Jonatan Vaatainen, a Finn who studied at Bournemouth Uni, reimagining what Disney characters would look like in real like. Just stunning. Secretly you know you see yourself as one of them 😋👗👑🦄